PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Buy-side decisions are moving closer to publishers. The shift, enabled by the IAB’s artificial intelligence maintenance “containerization project,” brings greater focus to where ad impressions actually originate rather than sending requests to distant infrastructure and waiting for responses.
“Historically, the sell side operated at great lengths to the buy side. We would send requests out to infrastructure, to public clouds and decisions to be made and then there’d be a race to get it back to the sell side,” Andrew Casale, president, CEO of Index Exchange, told Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’ve done something called containerization, which is part of the agentic framework that the IAB Tech Lab has rolled out, which effectively allows code to run closer to the sell side.”
This shift brings curation, data, and smart custom bidding algorithms closer to where publishers, consumers, and impressions originate.
Open web reduces walled garden advantage
The past decade saw open web publishers operate at disadvantage due to infrastructure distance, but solving problems in shared space could eliminate that gap and drive better marketer outcomes.
“As we all come together and solve problems in a similar space, we might actually get rid of that disadvantage and drive better performance,” Casale said. “What this ultimately means is driving better outcomes for marketers. I think that’s how we grow the pie for the open internet and hopefully level some of the advantage that the walled gardens have had.”
Walled gardens built closed, tight systems, but the open ecosystem aims to mimic those capabilities at internet scale.
Streaming dominates Index Exchange’s growth
Streaming has grown to nearly half of Index Exchange’s business over the past four to five years, providing a vantage point across publishers operating in different channels with distinct dynamics.
“We started the business over 20 years ago, back when the website dominated everything. We jumped into apps about 10 years ago,” Casale said. “But the real story for Index of the last four or five years has been streaming.”
Channel-specific challenges emerge
Original web publishers face significant change driven by Google AI Overviews that dramatically alter traffic patterns, creating both winners and losers depending on content categories.
The app ecosystem is embracing unified auctions and opening opportunities after historically operating in more closed fashion. Streaming continues rapid growth with live sports presenting difficult technical problems alongside exciting future potential.
“For us at Index, we’re just innovating in those different categories, depending on what our customers are looking for us to do,” Casale said.
Agentic capabilities unlock performance
As agents make advanced decisions at incredible scale in real-time, the industry can achieve capabilities that were previously impossible due to cost or computational constraints.
“We think that as we start to see new capabilities born with agents that are making these advanced decisions in real time at incredible scale, we’re going to be able to do almost other worldly things in advertising and in performance,” Casale said, noting the industry remains in early days of this innovation.
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